A Public Defender's Journal: Public Defense

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Public Defense

A Public Defender's Journal

By an Assistant Public Defender

Post Frequency: 0.3/day

Last Entry: August 09, 2009 at 23:52:00

Too Busy

Posted on August 09, 2009
I've tried four cases so far this year of my own, and sat second chair on the trial and retrial of another. Tomorrow, I'll probably pick a jury on a complicated, challenging child molestation. My opinion is that we will be fighting a long, uphill battle, yet the client wants to charge forward...

Frustration

Posted on June 04, 2009
The delivery of mental health services has largley transferred to the criminal justice system: for instance, the L.A. County jail has the largest mental health hospital in the world. As a result, people are arrested for petty crime, such as criminal trespass or disorderly conduct, and sitting in jail for a periods of time...

Long time, no post

Posted on June 17, 2008
I've got a jury deliberating on a rape case, just now. They went out on Monday at 1:45 and by 3:30 they sent out a note saying that they were deadlocked. They twice sent out notes that they were "deadlocked," today. In the last, they even said that they were "hopelessly deadlocked...

Belated update

Posted on January 28, 2008
The jury was out for about 8 hours. They convicted my guy of 3 counts of robbery by intimidation, 4 counts of aggravated assault, hung on the possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime, and acquitted on the 3 armed robbery counts. The verdict is inconsistent, at the least -- they convicted on the robbery by intimidation, but still found that a gun was involved in the aggravated assault counts...

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Jury's out

Posted on January 10, 2008
I tried a armed robbery/aggravated assault this week. I think it is a fairly good case, despite what the story sounds like at first blush. Four guys get robbed, allegedly by three other guys, and a cop just happens to roll buy and interrupt it. My guy runs...

Boggled

Posted on January 03, 2008
Client: Well, are they going to dismiss the case?Me: No, no, I don't think so. They want a trial or a plea.Client: There's no way that they're going to win -- they know that they don't have any evidence. I need to get home.Me: Well, what concerns me is that the dude is going to say that you pointed a gun in his face and took his stuff...

And the Judges always think we're nuts

Posted on December 22, 2007
An officer in a neighboring jursdiction started a blog and it apparently lies now in neglect, as it seems most blogs do.What's interesting about this blog is that it is written from the perspective of the cop out on the street. It traces his journey through the academy and his application for a job through his first three months on the street...

Ugh.

Posted on December 17, 2007
My Residential Mortgage Fraud client is scheduled for sentencing tomorrow. Apparently, the Attorney General's office is going to recommend two years to serve, followed by eight years of probation. (10 do 2, in local parlance.) That seems a bit excessive to me...

Progress and disappointment

Posted on December 16, 2007
The past six weeks have brought a whole new layer of sophistication to my practice. I havemade widespread use of our investigators, and thank god for themhired a private psychologist to perform a competency evaluation on a client, concerned not about mental illness but about mental statushired a polygrapher to examine a clientHaving someone else to actually get stuff for you, whether its witness interviews, documents, or whatever, is a such a luxury...

No Comment

Posted on December 01, 2007
The truth is much, much stranger than fiction.

Sucks

Posted on October 30, 2007
The client that I've written about in the last few posts entered a plea today. We had a pretrial, and I had hoped to talk her down, but the Judge ended up following the prosecutor's recommendation.My client was involved in three armed robberies which happened over the course of two days...

Update

Posted on October 24, 2007
I'm in, but now I'm a little pissed. Before the calendar call, the D.A. was interested in what the client had to say about a co-defendant. But now, since that co-defendant is set up for a plea, the D.A. isn't interested anymore.The delay in resolving this issue, at this stage of the proceedings, has cost my client the opportunity to lower his sentence...

Waiting

Posted on October 17, 2007
The first week of the trial calendar is nearly half over, and I've got a problem.I represent one guy that's charged with a series of offenses, and he's one of three co-defendants. The conflict defender is already handling one, and the second co-defendant is being represented by another attorney in our office...

Testing

Posted on October 11, 2007
Does this thing still work?I've been awfully, awfully busy lately. As you might imagine. I second-chaired a child molestation case, which we won. That was incredibly sad -- our client was 13 when the alleged incident occurred. I have all kinds of respect for people that represent juveniles charged as adults...

Caesura

Posted on August 11, 2007
My daughter was born this past Tuesday. Everyone is healthy and good.However, I am on paternity leave for the next week and a half and won't have much of chance to write anything here. Do not despair, oh faithful readers.(*crickets*)I'm returning to work somewhere right around the 21st, I think, and will be confronting a trial calendar when I do...

Another promotion

Posted on July 30, 2007
Today, I found out that I am being reassigned to felonies, which are prosecuted in the uperior Court, here. I defended felonies before I came to the South, six years ago. I've almost forgotten what it's like, now.I've been pretty well unsettled for the past month and a half, first going to the supervisor's position a week early, while I still had trials set...

Bomb threat update

Posted on July 26, 2007
Well, I came to work today to be greeted by a very visible police presence. There were deputies in the parking lot, turning non-employees away. Which was nice, because there aren't ever any parking spots, because of the probationers. There were police officers inside of the building, just hanging out and observing...

Empty threats

Posted on July 25, 2007
Our office is located in a building across the street from the courthouse, which is nice, in many ways. It reduces the appearance that we're "working for the State" and keeps us a little bit out of the loop, in a good way. We're in a big county, the second most populous in the State, I'm guessing...

Title change

Posted on July 17, 2007
In my haste to begin blogging, I couldn't think of a good title for this space, so I went with the obvious. I'm a public defender, I'm writing about day-to-day work, hence, "A Public Defender's Journal." However, this title was always provisional, until I could think of something better...

Promotion update

Posted on July 16, 2007
Things with the new position are going swimmingly. Mostly, I backup inmate arraignments and arraignments, and triage mental health clients. And, of course, I am a sounding board for the division attorneys on motion and trial tactics.I've had this position for three (?!) weeks now...

Things not to wear to court

Posted on July 11, 2007
Walking passed security and out of the front door the courthouse yesterday, I saw a lady walking in with a t-shirt that caught my eye. It was black, very tight, and across the chest said, "I WOULD NEVER FUCK YOU." I had to take a second glance, because the "NEVER" was in much smaller print than the rest...

Trial update

Posted on June 27, 2007
My boss re-tried the murder case last week. The child who died was horribly abused in his short life. He had multiple broken ribs and over 30 healing bruises on his body. One of the bruises was in the shape of a little hand. The big question, of course, was who did all of this to the child...

Drama! Controversy! Juror Misconduct!

Posted on June 13, 2007
Our murder trial ended unexpectedly today. More on that in a minute.Jury selection finished up yesterday morning, and we executed our strikes. Here, peremptory strikes are silent -- a piece of paper is passed back and forth between the parties and they either accept or reject the veniremen...

Tired

Posted on June 11, 2007
I'm "helping" our Chief Trial Assistant out with a murder trial that started just today. We spent all day today on preliminary motions and voir dire. And we didn't even get a jury picked.

Anticipation

Posted on May 31, 2007
Part of the Big City Next Door actually lies in our county. For whatever reason, it is almost impossible to get the officers from that jurisdiction into our court. Last year, I had a vehicular homicide case that was dismissed for want of prosecution because the investigator never bothered to return phone calls, either from the State or from us...

Promotion

Posted on May 29, 2007
Well, starting in July, I'm going to have a new position in our office. The Big Boss has seen fit to make one of the two supervisors in our misdemeanor court. It will be a nice change of pace -- I will no longer have my own trial caseload, but will be helping out at jail pleas and arraignments...

Things I Like

Posted on May 22, 2007
Writing an appeal brief while listening to Slayer.

Outed

Posted on May 01, 2007
A very funny thing happened today. A fellow blogger happened to come in contact with one of The Bosses today. The dots were connected, and the blogger explained that he knew one of the attorneys in the office, through this very blog.This Boss is pretty clever (not that I suspect that she is reading these very words!), and immediately narrowed the field of potential supsects to two...

The Big 200

Posted on April 23, 2007
The 200th person was exonerated today as the result of the good work of the people at the Innocence Project and the its affiliates. It is just a little scary that so many people could have wrongly been convicted. Even scarier, I think, is the fact that science is only able to exonerate people or confirm convictions in those cases where DNA is at issue...